Emily Pera
Two Poems
I Feel a Poem Coming On
A cough, a sneeze, a discreet wiping
Of nouns and verbs into my sleeve,
Pen at the ready to take
The temperature of my writing.
The sunny spring proceeds
Unperturbed as we shelter in place.
Outside my writing desk window,
The new leaves are unfurling,
The crocuses blooming,
The ducks cavorting in such a way as to say:
We know you humans are doomed.
The blank page looms,
Unwritten fear infecting my brain
With seeping knowledge that handwashing
Can prevent transmission but only stall
Societal breakdown.
I sneeze, sanitize and feel
A poem coming on.
Quarantined Love
Sausages in the pantry? you asked,
What, are you trying to kill me?
I burst out laughing at the impossibility of planning for apocalypse,
Second only to the impossibility of your death,
Yet had still been the one to stock up
On canned sausage jambalaya.
Lucky as we are with our health and our pantry,
Our bodies will fight the virus with twinned forces:
Canned sausages,
Quarantined love.
Emily Pera‘s poetry have appeared in The 64: 2019 (Black Mountain Press, 2019), the Poeming Pigeon and Bryant Literary Review. She is based in Providence and hails originally from Chicago.
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